What I Believe

by E.M. Forster
from Two Cheers for Democracy

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds
that, in self-defence, one has to f ormulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and
sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution,
in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient
pimp. T olerance, good temper and sympathy - they are what matter really, and if the human
race is not to collapse they must come t o the front before long. But for the moment they are
not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered ben eath a military jackboot.
They want stiffening, even if the p rocess coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening
process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as p ossible. I dislike
the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all. Herein I probably differ from most
people, who believe in Belief, and are only sorry they cannot swallow even more than t hey do.
My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not
upon Mount Moriah but in t hat Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My
motto is: "Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

I have, however, to live in an Age of Faith - the sort of epoch I used to hear praised when I
was a boy. It is extremely unpleasant really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I
h ave to keep my end up in it. Where do I start?

With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively s olid in a world full of violence
and cruelty. Not absolutely solid, for Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a
"Person", and h as shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any
moment rise to the surface and destroy our n ormal balance. We don't know what we are like.
We can't k now what other people are like. How, then, can we put any t rust in personal
relationships, or cling to them in the gathering p olitical storm? In theory we cannot. But in
practice we can and d o. Though A is not unchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can
still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of living one has to assume that the
personality is solid, and the "self" is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since
to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe
in personal relationships.

Starting from them, I get a little order into the contemporary chaos. One must be fond of
people and trust them if one is not t o make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they
should n ot let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I  m ust, myself, be as
reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract - that is the
main difference b etween the world of personal relationships and the world of b usiness
relationships. It is a matter for the heart, which signs no d ocuments. In other words, reliability
is impossible unless there is a natural warmth. Most men possess this warmth, though t hey
often have bad luck and get chilled. Most of them, even when they are politicians, want to
keep faith. And one can, at all events, show one's own little light here, one's own poor little
trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is s hining in the darkness,
and not the only one which the darkness d oes not comprehend. Personal relations are
despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather
which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some
movement or cause instead. I h ate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between
betraying m y country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the g uts to betray my
country. Such a choice may scandalize the  m odern reader, and he may stretch out his
patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked
Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the l owest circle of Hell because they had
chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome. Probably o ne will
not be asked to make such an agonizing choice. Still, t here lies at the back of every creed
something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer, and
there is even a terror and a hardness in this creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild
though it sounds. Love and l oyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State.
When they do — down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.

This brings me along to Democracy, "Even love, the beloved Republic, That feeds upon
freedom and lives". Democracy is not a beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is
less hateful t han other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent it deserves our
support. It does start from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types
are needed t o make a civilization. It does not divide its citizens into the b ossers and the bossed
- as an efficiency-regime tends to do. The p eople I admire most are those who are sensitive
and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power,
and such people get more of a chance under a d emocracy than elsewhere. They found
religions, great or small, o r they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific
research, or they may be what is called "ordinary p eople", who are creative in their private
lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbours. All t hese people
need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them liberty to do so, and
the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.

Democracy has another merit. It allows criticism, and if there is not public criticism there are
bound to be hushed-up scandals. T hat is why I believe in the press, despite all its lies and
vulgarity, and why I believe in Parliament. Parliament is often sneered a b ecause it is a
Talking Shop. I believe in it because it is a talking s hop. I believe in the Private Member who
makes himself a n uisance. He gets snubbed and is told that he is cranky or ill- i nformed, but
he does expose abuses which would otherwise n ever have been mentioned, and very often an
abuse gets put right just by being mentioned. Occasionally, too, a well-meaning p ublic
official starts losing his head in the cause of efficiency, and t hinks himself God Almighty.
Such officials are particularly frequent in the Home Office. Well, there will be questions about
them in Parliament sooner or later, and then they will have to  mind their steps. Whether
Parliament is either a representative b ody or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it
because it criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported. So two cheers for
Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are
quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves
that.

What about Force, though? While we are trying to be sensitive and advanced and affectionate
and tolerant, an unpleasant question pops up: does not all society rest upon force? If a
govern ment cannot count upon the police and the army, how can it hope to rule? And if an
individual gets knocked on t he head or sent to a labour camp, of what significance are his
opinions? T his dilemma does not worry me as much as it does some. I realize that all society
rests upon force. But all the great creative actions, all the decent human relations, occur
during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the front. These i ntervals are
what matter. I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as possible, and I call them "
civilization ". Some people i dealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it,
instead of keeping it in the background as long as possible. I t hink they make a mistake, and
I think that their opposites, the m ystics, err even more when they declare that force does not
exist. I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from getting out of its
box. It gets out sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have
made. But it is not out all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong are so stupid.
Consider their conduct for a moment in The Nibelung's Ring. The giants there have the guns,
or in other words t he gold; but they do nothing with it, they do not realize that t hey are all-
powerful, with the result that the catastrophe is delayed and the castle of Valhalla, insecure but
glorious, fronts t he storms. Fafnir, coiled round his hoard, grumbles and grunts; we can hear
him under Europe today; the leaves of the wood already tremble, and the Bird calls its
warnings uselessly. Fafnir will destroy us, but by a blessed dispensation he is stupid and slow,
and creation goes on just outside the poisonous blast of his breath. T he Nietzschean would
hurry the monster up, the mystic would say he did not exist, but Wotan, wiser than either,
hastens to create warriors before doom declares itself. The Valkyries are s ymbols not only of
courage but of intelligence; they represent the h uman spirit snatching its opportunity while
the going is good, and one of them even finds time to love. Bruennhilde's last song h ymns the
recurrence of love, and since it is the privilege of art to exaggerate she goes even further, and
proclaims the love which is eternally triumphant, and feeds upon freedom and lives.

So that is what I feel about force and violence. It is, alas ! t he ultimate reality on this earth, but
it does not always get to t he front. Some people call its absences "decadence"; I call t hem
"civilization" and find in such interludes the chief justification for the human experiment. I
look the other way until fate strikes me. Whether this is due to courage or to cowardice in my
own case I cannot be sure. But I know that, if men had not l ooked the other way in the past,
nothing of any value would survive. The people I respect most behave as if they were
immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of t hem must be
accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few
breathing-holes for the h uman spirit. No millennium seems likely to descend upon h umanity;
no better and stronger League of Nations will be i nstituted; no form of Christianity and no
alternative to Christianity will bring peace to the world or integrity to the individual; n o
"change of heart" will occur. And yet we need not despair, i ndeed, we cannot despair; the
evidence of history shows us that men have always insisted on behaving creatively under the
shadow of the sword; that they have done their artistic and scientific and domestic stuff for
the sake of doing it, and that we had b etter follow their example under the shadow of the
aeroplanes. Others, with more vision or courage than myself, see the salvation of humanity
ahead, and will dismiss my conception of civilization as paltry, a sort of tip-and-run game.
Certainly it is pres umptuous to say that we cannot improve, and that Man, who h as only been
in power for a few thousand years, will never learn t o make use of his power. All I mean is
that, if people continue to k ill one another as they do, the world cannot get better than it is,
and that, since there are more people than formerly, and their  means for destroying one
another superior, the world may well g et worse. What is good in people - and consequently in
the world - is their insistence on creation, their belief in friendship and loyalty for their own
sakes; and, though Violence remains and is, indeed, the major partner in this muddled
establishment, I b elieve that creativeness remains too, and will always assume direction when
violence sleeps. So, though I am not an optimist, I cannot agree with Sophocles that it were
better never to have b een born. And although, like Horace, I see no evidence that each batch
of births is superior to the last, I leave the field open f or the more complacent view. This is
such a difficult moment to live in, one cannot help getting gloomy and also a bit rattled, and
p erhaps short-sighted.

In search of a refuge, we may perhaps turn to hero-worship. But here we shall get no help, in
my opinion. Hero-worship is a d angerous vice, and one of the minor merits of a democracy is
that it does not encourage it, or produce that unmanageable type o f citizen known as the
Great Man. It produces instead different k inds of small men - a much finer achievement. But
people who cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up t heir own minds,
get discontented over this, and they long for a h ero to bow down before and to follow
blindly. It is significant t hat a hero is an integral part of the authoritarian stock-in-trade
today. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off
the dullness - much as plums have to b e put into a bad pudding to make it palatable. One
hero at the t op and a smaller one each side of him is a favourite arrangement, and the timid
and the bored are comforted by the trinity, and, b owing down, feel exalted and strengthened.

No, I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool
of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper. Every now
and t hen one reads in the newspapers some such statement as: "The coup d'etat appears to
have failed, and Admiral Toma's whereabouts is at present unknown." Admiral Toma had
probably every qualification for being a Great Man - an iron will, personal magnetism, dash,
flair, sexlessness - but fate was against him, so h e retires to unknown whereabouts instead of
parading history with his peers. He fails with a completeness which no artist and n o lover can
experience, because with them the process of creation is itself an achievement, whereas with
him the only possible achievement is success.

I believe in aristocracy, though - if that is the right word, and i f a democrat may use it. Not an
aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the
considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all n ations and classes, and all
through the ages, and there is a secret u nderstanding between them when they meet. They
represent t he true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty
and chaos. Thousands of them perish in o bscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive
for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not
swankiness but the power to endure, and t hey can take a joke. I give no examples - it is risky
to do that - b ut the reader may as well consider whether this is the type of p erson he would
like to meet and to be, and whether (going f urther with me) he would prefer that this type
should not be an ascetic one. I am against asceticism myself. I am with the old Scotsman who
wanted less chastity and more delicacy. I do not feel that my aristocrats are a real aristocracy
if they thwart their b odies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and
enjoy the world. Still, I do not insist. This is not a  major point. It is clearly possible to be
sensitive, considerate and plucky and yet be an ascetic too, and if anyone possesses the first
three qualities I will let him in! On they go - an invincible army, y et not a victorious one. The
aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, t he Best People - all the words that describe them are false,
and all attempts to organize them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried
to net them and to utilize them as the E gyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the
Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip
through the net and are gone; when the door is shut, they are no longer in the room; their
temple, as one of t hem remarked, is the holiness of the Heart's affections, and their kingdom,
though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one's path if one has eyes to
see or hands to feel, the experi ment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure. But it may
well be hailed as a tragedy, the tragedy being that no device has b een found by which these
private decencies can be transrnitted t o public affairs. As soon as people have power they go
crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because the possession of power lifts them into a region
where normal honesty never pays. For i nstance, the man who is selling newspapers ourtside
the Houses o f Parliament can safely leave his papers to go for a drink, and h is cap beside
them: anyone who takes a paper is sure to drop a copper into the cap. But the men who are
inside the Houses of Parliament - they cannot trust one another like that, still less can t he
Government they compose trust other governments. No caps upon the pavement here, but
suspicion, treachery and armaments. The more highly public life is organized the lower d oes
its morality sink ; the nations of today behave to each other worse than they ever did in the
past, they cheat, rob, bully and bluff, make war without notice, and kill as many women and
children as possible; whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos. It is a
humiliating outlook - though the g reater the darkness, the brighter shine the little lights,
reassuring o ne another, signalling: "Well, at all events, I 'm still here. I d on' t like it very much,
but how are you ?" Unquenchable lights o f my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army!
"Come along - anyway, let's have a good time while we can. "I think they signal that too.

The Saviour of the future - if ever he comes - will not preach a new Gospel. He will merely
utilize my aristocracy, he will make effective the goodwill and the good temper which are
already existing. In other words, he will introduce a new technique. In economics, we are told
that if there was a new technique of d istribution there need be no poverty, and people would
not starve in one place while crops were being ploughed under in another. A similar change is
needed in the sphere of morals and p olitics. The desire for it is by no means new; it was
expressed, for example, in theological terms by Jacopone da Todi over six h undred years
ago. "Ordena questo amore, tu che m'ami, " h e said ; "O thou who lovest me set this love in
order." His p rayer was not granted, and I do not myself believe that it ever will be, but here,
and not through a change of heart, is our p robable route. Not by becoming better, but by
ordering and d istributing his native goodness, will Man shut up Force into its b ox, and so gain
time to explore the universe and to set his mark u pon it worthily. At present he only explores
it at odd moments, when Force is looking the other way, and his divine creativeness appears as
a trivial by-product, to be scrapped as soon as the d rums beat and the bombers hum.

Such a change, claim the orthodox, can only be made by Christianity, and will be made by it
in God's good time: man always has failed and always will fail to organize his own good- n ess,
and it is presumptuous of him to try. This claim - solemn as it is - leaves me cold. I cannot
believe that Christianity will ever cope with the present world-wide mess, and I think that such
influence as it retains in modern society is due to the money b ehind it, rather than to its
spiritual appeal. It was a spiritual f orce once, but the indwelling spirit will have to be restated
if it is to calm the waters again, and probably restated in a non- Christian form. Naturally a lot
of people, and people who are n ot only good but able and intelligent, will disagree here; they
will vehemently deny that Christianity has failed, or they will argue that its failure proceeds
from the wickedness of men, and really proves its ultimate success. They have Faith, with a
large F. My faith has a very small one, and I only intrude it because t hese are strenuous and
serious days, and one likes to say what o ne thinks while speech is comparatively free; it may
not be free m uch longer.

The above are the reflections of an individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism
crumbling beneath him and at first felt ashamed. Then, looking around, he decided there was
no special reason for shame, since other people, whatever they felt, were equally insecure.
And as for individualism - there seems no way o f getting off this, even if one wanted to. The
dictator-hero can g rind down his citizens till they are all alike, but he cannot melt t hem into a
single man. That is beyond his power. He can order t hem to merge, he can incite them to
mass-antics, but they are o bliged to be born separately, and to die separately, and, owing t o
these unavoidable termini, will always be running off the t otalitarian rails. The memory of
birth and the expectation of d eath always lurk within the human being, making him separate
from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with t hem. Naked I came into the
world, naked I shall go out of it!  And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am
naked u nder my shirt, whatever its colour.